Meta seeks to power data centers with energy beamed from space

Meta Platforms Inc. is looking to powerfulness artificial quality information centers with star vigor collected successful space, taking a caller attack to gathering its insatiable request for electricity.

The institution said Monday that it clinched a woody for up to 1 gigawatt of abstraction star vigor from Overview Energy, a startup seeking to cod sunlight successful satellites orbiting Earth and person it into energy to enactment the grid. A gigawatt is astir equivalent to the powerfulness generated by a atomic reactor.

Overview Energy’s imaginativeness for a space-based powerfulness works that beams vigor backmost to Earth is inactive hypothetical. The startup is continuing to make and trial its underlying technology, with plans to behaviour an archetypal orbital objection successful 2028.

Meta declined to remark connected the fiscal presumption of the agreement, which would supply preferential entree to Overview Energy’s aboriginal capacity. The companies said they expect commercialized powerfulness transportation successful 2030.

Meta isn’t the lone 1 looking to abstraction to conscionable its information halfway needs. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others person discussed putting the computing facilities themselves successful orbit.

For Meta, the determination is portion of a monolithic AI spending spree. The institution is allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to unafraid the energy, infrastructure and computing capableness needed to enactment its artificial quality plans.

It hopes that Overview Energy volition connection it entree to clean, “uninterrupted energy,” Nat Sahlstrom, Meta’s vice president of vigor and sustainability, said successful a statement.

Meta’s AI ambitions person relied heavy connected earthy gas, which it has viewed arsenic a much accordant and reliable signifier of vigor than immoderate cleaner sources.

The institution is supporting the improvement of 10 caller gas-fired plants for its biggest AI information halfway campus, which it is presently gathering successful agrarian Louisiana.

Overview Energy, based successful bluish Virginia, is capitalizing connected the thought that the prima ne'er sets successful space.

If its efforts to cod continuous vigor and beam it backmost to receivers connected Earth are successful, it could supply a cleanable vigor solution that avoids immoderate of the limitations of terrestrial star panels. Their show varies based connected weather, clip of time and the season.

Griffin writes for Bloomberg.